In Decadence, Michael Onfray seeks to set forth a “philosophy of history” outlining the origins and end of Christendom (or Judeo-Christianity, as he calls it). Onfray is the French equivalent of the representatives of “New Atheism” in the English-speaking world. For his guiding lights, our author draws on on Nietzsche, the ancient epicureans, and the atheist writers of the enlightenment and of the 19th century. For example, Onfray lists as a primary source for much of this history Francis (sic) Gibbons ’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Onfray’s style is colorful, if at times a bit ranting and not free of errors. His analysis is not so much a detailed review of historical facts but usually presents a discussion of one or more representative texts from each topic he covers.

The first half of the book – covering developments from the time of Christ until the 16th century – describes the birth and flourishing of “Judeo-Christianity.” You have heard the substance of these chapters often before: “Christ” was a fiction, St Paul was a neurotic who hated the body and women, Christianity was invented by Constantine to cement his rule and adopted by the masses seeking relief from their suffering state. From these beginnings the Church promoted violence, war and hatred of the body, persecuted Jews, witches and women, massacred native peoples in the Americas etc. In a later period, Fascism and specifically Hitler appear as a creation of Pius XII (the triumphant proof? Mein Kampf was not put on the index of prohibited books) It is all very familiar and moreover seems to recycle material from Onfray’s other books (notably his magnum opus Atheologie).

In the second half of his work, the author narrates the post medieval period of “Exhaustion.” The edifice of Christendom started to wobble when certain enlightened individuals started to read certain non–theistic texts from antiquity, to understand science and to think for themselves.

Based on what you have read so far of his views you would expect Onfray to be a celebrity honored by The Guardian, the New York Times and Le Monde, and to be a regular speaker on the French broadcast media and the BBC. Indeed, his books have been best sellers in France and elsewhere in Europe. But in the final post-1789 sections of his work “Senescence” and “Decay” Onfray departs from the establishment’s “politically correct” narrative. His view of the French Revolution and its campaigns of extermination is decidedly unfavorable. Nor does he admire Marxism and the innumerable massacres it brought about. As the story moves into a time of which the author has direct experience his criticism intensifies. He doesn’t think much of structuralism, Freudianism and other fads of the French intelligentsia. The same is true of the cult of “contemporary art.” The result of these ideologies is a European incapacity to either recognize reality or to defend itself. Onfray is particularly harsh on the intellectuals’ current love affair with Islam: he spends many pages recounting the misdeeds of the “religion of peace.” But like Houellebecq, he contrasts Islam’s vitality with the senescent nihilism of contemporary Europe.

The chapter entitled “Christian De-Christianization: the Imminent Paraclete of Vatican II” will be of particular interest to the Traditional Catholic. For Onfray views Vatican II as a major contributor to the current nihilist crisis – particularly by its changes to the liturgy. For example:

“This destruction of the sacred, this massacre of transcendence, this trivial descent on earth by the Divinity culminated in the new “stage design” of the mass. For centuries the tabernacle, which contains the Holy Ghost, had been set on the altar, which stands at the end of the sanctuary. There the priest celebrated the mass before this sacred object. The celebrant, clothed in priestly vestments, had his back to the faithful because he was facing the Sacred, in the presence of the Divine, gazing at the Holy Spirit, in direct contact with the Divinity, in the sight of the consecrated host and thus of the real presence of the Body of Christ. This location proves to be eminently symbolic because it is the place of the rising sun, in other words, the direction from which Christ will come at the final judgment. …

The liturgical changes of Vatican II abolished this arrangement in favor of a new set design: an altar is built in the choir between the sanctuary where the Holy Spirit is found and the nave where the mass of the faithful prays. This time the priest turns his back to the tabernacle, thus to the rising sun, thus to the second coming of God and thus to God himself – all in in order to face the people which from now on can look at him face to face. Certainly the priest is closer to his flock but that is at the price of a greater distance from God. Of the realm of the symbolic and of allegory it’s terrible: in order to bring people closer to God Vatican II realized exactly the opposite.” (page 517)

These views accord with conclusions previously reached by numerous other observers – both Catholic Traditionalists and secular. We have covered many of them in this blog. Onfray renders us a real service by detailing for us the incompatibility of Christianity with the ”modern world. ”

The civilization of rock and of comic books, of movies and television, of nightclubs and of nicotine addiction, of the birth control pill and of divorce, of alcohol and narcotics, of the refrigerator and of the automobile, of the atomic bomb and of the Cold War, of free love and of leisure, of money and of objects, advances while crushing everything in its path. Vatican II couldn’t do anything about it. It even seems that, having wanted to be a remedy, the Council exacerbated the disease. By making God a pal to slap on the back, 1) of the priest a buddy to be invited to share a vacation, of symbolism an old fashioned thing to be abolished, of the mystery of transcendence a banal immanence, of the mass a show imitating the layout of a television broadcast, of ritual an affair drawing indiscriminately on the success of popular hits or on the naive art of the craziest believers, of the message of Christ a simple labor union tract, of the soutane a theatrical costume, of other religions spiritualties as valid as that of Christianity, the Church precipitated the movement forward which proclaimed its own fall. (page 518)

Yes, Onfray’s view of the modern world is a dim one. The key prophets of the current age turned out to be not Rousseau, Marx or Tocqueville but Orwell and Huxley. He describes the incomplete cathedral of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona as the symbol of the end of Christendom – the Christian equivalent of Chernobyl, the ruin of the contemporary technological age. The modern age cannot finish even this one church after a century. For Onfray it is the summit of irony that it was Pope Benedict XVI who consecrated this “ruin of Christianity”.

“La Sagrada Familia remains a ruin and the Pope who consecrated it has resigned. Rome is no more (even) in Rome.” (page 21)

Yes, we can agree with Onfray that historical Christendom is well and truly dead! But where I would beg to differ from him is this: I see Christianity continuing in a thousand places. Whatever the public profile and political influence of the institutional Church may be, Christianity continues. And whatever buffooneries are taking place in Rome right now, the real Rome continues in the celebration of the Traditional Mass.

tutoyer “to address with familiar ‘tu.’”

(The translations are mine for which I request the reader’s forbearance.)

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